Books
pharyngula | May 15, 2006How do we know how old things are? That's a straightforward and very scientific question, and exactly the kind of thing students ought to ask; it's also the kind of question that has been muddled up by lots of bad information (blame the creationists), and can be difficult for a teacher to answer. There are a great many dating methods, and you may need to be a specialist to understand many of them…and heck, I'm a biologist, not a geologist or physicist. I've sort of vaguely understood the principles of measuring isotope ratios, but try to pin me down on all the details and I'd have to scurry…
pharyngula | May 6, 2006Our Seed Overlords have asked a question (our answering is entirely voluntary, if you were wondering, and we're only answering because it is an interesting question): "if you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?"
Several of my colleagues here have coughed up answers—Adventures in Ethics and Science (with a particularly appropriate entry),
Afarensis,
Evolgen,
Living the Scientific Life, and
Stranger Fruit—but I'm going to be a little bit contrary and question the question.
My answer is "none."
I don't see most of…
pharyngula | May 3, 2006I'm going to have to get this book, Sex, Drugs, and DNA (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)
just on the basis of a few excerpts…
Unfortunately, the US is a nation of very stupid people. So I
have stripped out the jargon and tried to deal with science
and health issues as though I was haranguing you at a party.
…and…
The strange thing about talking to non-scientists about science is that you quickly notice that some of the smartest,
most thoughtful and intellectually curious people have a terrible understanding of it. Most students leave high school
poorly equipped to manipulate even the most basic…
pharyngula | May 1, 2006How else can you explain why those adorable screaming moonbats at the Daily Kos have come up with a science book? I'm kind of dismayed that good science has become a partisan issue, but don't blame us—our side puts out stuff like Kosmos: You Are Here, while the righties seem to have a surfeit of Lotts and Bethells.
pharyngula | April 25, 2006This really is an excellent review of three books in the field of evo-devo—
From DNA to Diversity: Molecular Genetics and the Evolution of Animal Design (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll),
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and
The Plausibility of Life:Resolving Darwin's Dilemma (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—all highly recommended by me and the NY Times. The nice thing about this review, too, is that it gives a short summary of the field and its growing importance.
pharyngula | April 18, 2006Zenoferox has dug up a review of Crichton's Andromeda Strain from 1969—Alexei Panshin tore into him for his bad science even then. I remember seeing the movie in junior high school myself, and feeling ripped off by the incredibly flaccid ending.
pharyngula | April 10, 2006
Who would have thought these words would ever be typed by me? I'm looking forward to Ann Coulter's new book.
It's called Godless(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Apparently, Ann Coulter has written a book about me, although I suspect that she'll instead be pretending that people like me are representative of the Democratic Party as a whole. I wish.
I'm sure it will be insightful, nuanced, and meticulously researched. Maybe Al Franken and I should get together in a summer book club to discuss it.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
Ann Coulter
P.S.…
pharyngula | April 1, 2006Some fields of science are so wide open, such virgin swamps of unexplored territory, that it takes some radically divergent approaches to make any headway. There will always be opinionated, strong-minded investigators who charge in deeply and narrowly, committed to their pet theories, and there will also be others who consolidate information and try to synthesize the variety of approaches taken. There are dead ends and areas of solid progress, and there is much flailing about until the promising leads are discovered.
Origins of life research is such an unsettled frontier. I wouldn't want to…
pharyngula | March 22, 2006Here's a really good question from Katrina Refugee:
Due to the unforeseen events of Katrina, my family and I ended up staying with relatives in South Carolina, and my children (for the year) are going to a small Christian school with their cousins (the public schools in this area are quite horrendous and we were trying to ease the transition as best as possible). They will be back in public school next year, but in the meantime have been exposed to some really silly creationist crap in the science classroom.
Can you recommend some reading material for the summer to "wash away" all the stuff…
pharyngula | February 19, 2006You can tell when a dogmatic theist has to review a book by an unapologetic atheist: there's a lot of indignant spluttering, and soon the poor fellow is looking for an excuse to dismiss the whole exercise, so that he doesn't have to actually think about the issues. That's the case with Leon Wieseltier's review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell—it's kind of like watching a beached fish gasp and flounder, yet at the same time he apparently believes he's the one with the gaff hook and club.
It's full of self-important declarations that reduce to incoherence, such as this one:
You cannot disprove…
pharyngula | February 15, 2006A few disclaimers: I do get kickbacks from affiliate programs when you purchase books after clicking through those links. If you'd rather not fund a perfidious atheist's book addiction, just look up the titles at your preferred source—I don't mind. This list is not a thinly-veiled attempt to get readers to buy me presents, either; I've read all these, so please don't try to order them for me. Get them for a creationist instead, they need them more.
A while back, I presented a book list for evolutionists. Now I've updated it, adding a few recommendations and adding links so you can choose your…
pharyngula | February 6, 2006So scribblingwoman finally reads some recent China Miéville, long after Crooked Timber covered it (nothing wrong with that…if you saw my stack of books waiting for me to finish them…). She brings up a few interesting points, though, and one in particular poked me right in my reading biases. In Perdido Street Station(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), one of the central characters, Lin, meets a particularly unpleasant fate, and this after we'd been reading about her for a long time, gotten to know and like her and find her engaging. Then, wham:
And it's true that while Lin's fate is hardly aesthetic —…
pharyngula | January 27, 2006I've already mentioned this interesting set of ideas Cory Doctorow brought up. In particular, this part of the introduction made me think:
Cory is an author of science fiction (SF) and is published in the US by Tor books (which happens to share a parent company with Nature). He also gives away books on the web. As Tim O'Reilly says, the main danger for most authors is not piracy but obscurity. The number of people who don't buy a book because they can copy the electronic version is trivial compared to the number who buy it as a result of finding it online. Now the biggest factor determining…
pharyngula | January 27, 2006Daniel Dennett has this new book out, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I don't know that I want to read it. It was just reviewed by Michael Shermer in Science, and my general feeling was an uncomfortable vibration, liking some of what they said, but feeling at the same time that it was a tossup whether Shermer or Dennett is more annoying. Shermer has a tendency to be conciliatory towards religious babble, while Dennett has this overwhelming adaptationist bias that makes me cranky.
I've put a chunk of the review below the fold, let me know what…
cmooney | January 23, 2006My book was reviewed in the Sunday Times of London yesterday. The reviewer was generally positive. Nevertheless, presumably out of the standard critic impulse to say something, anything negative, he created one of the most staggering strawmen I've ever witnessed:
But the central plank of [Mooney's] argument is the embryonic stem-cell issue. There is no doubt that Bush's solution to his dilemma was based on atrocious science. Exposing that fact is one thing. But to question the right of anybody to oppose experiments on human embryos, as Mooney does, is quite another. [Italics added]
Actually…
cmooney | January 22, 2006Although it isn't out yet, people already seem to be pre-ordering Bobby Henderson's The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm one of them; heck, I already have the FSM T-shirt. I predict that Henderson's book will be a huge success, and in the process will further serve to prove a key axiom: Intelligent design may not count as science, but it's hard to think of anything more ripe for parody.
Advance reviews of the book look pretty promising:
"If Intelligent Design is taught in schools, equal time should be given to the FSM theory and the non-FSM theory."
--Professor Douglas Shaw, Ph.D…
jlynch | January 12, 2006There is a nice piece in The New Republic (Jan 16th, unfortunately not online) titled "A Reason For Everything" in which Alan Wolfe reviews Rodney Stark's book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random, 2005; Amazon). Stark is a sociologist (rather than an historian) at Baylor University, and has previously written such works as For The Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, 2003; Amazon), One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, 2001; Amazon) and…
sb admin | January 10, 2006So what do you see? A groove and some lines? Truth be told, this is possibly the oldest recorded chordate fossil (or, should I say, one of a number of seventeen specimens of same). It dates from the pre-Cambrian - i.e. before 543 million years ago - during a period known as the Ediacarian. Found by Ross Faraghar seven years ago in the Flinders Range of Australia, the specimens represent our earliest view of chordate evolution, that is, the evolution of the group that we belong to (along with a few squishy things, and the more familiar fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals). Unfortunately,…
stcynic | September 7, 2004I was out of the office and on the road all day today, and part of it was spent in a college town. I live in a small town that is nearly an hour to the nearest bookstore, so I took the opportunity to stop into one and pick up Azar Nafisi's book Reading Lolita in Tehran. I'm about 50 pages into it (I read fast and took a long lunch) and finding it enormously compelling so far. Nafisi is an excellent writer and she manages to transport even this American male into the world of an Iranian woman living under the rule of the Ayatollahs. "It is amazing," she writes, "how, when all possibilities…